Exactly three years ago, those who pre-ordered began receiving their T-Mobile G1′s, the little phone that started it all. I was lucky enough to be in that group. After spending several hours with the bronze-colored geegaw on October 20, 2008, I wrote up my breathless, geeked-out thoughts for my personal blog. It’s cute, I was excited about things like “a nice MySpace client.” For nostalgia’s sake, here are my first impressions of the good ol’ G1:

So I just lost the last several hours to playing around with my new Google phone (officially the T-Mobile G1, but I have a hard time not calling it the Google phone).

The UPS man about gave me a heart attack, leaving it sitting on the front porch, no signature needed apparently. I checked UPS tracking at work and saw DELIVERED, rushed home to get it on my lunch break.

I had to get the data plan set up on the right phone line so called in to T-Mobile on the way back to work…learned that the plan will not actually be in effect til the phone’s launch date, this Wednesday. I used this to convince myself it’d just be a brick til then, which allowed me to focus on work the rest of the day. But I powered it up when I got home: lo and behold, I was able to associate it with my gmail acct, make calls, even send and receive email. But nothing from the browser, maps, etc.

Then I switched on wifi– and everything worked.

The author, still giddy in November '08

My early report: it’s really great. As I said, it had me sucked in all night. It is truly a tiny little computer. I don’t have iPhone experience to compare it to, but the browser is functional, email really nice, and maps as cool as you expect. Downloaded a bunch of apps from the market (all free at this point), and while not all are great, some are really cool:

ShopSavvy, which lets you scan a barcode with the phone’s camera and then finds prices for the same item at online retailers

The keyboard is plenty roomy and I’m able to thumb around pretty easily and accurately.

I set up a shortcut to BeTwittered for use as a Twitter client. As it was designed to live in an iGoogle gadget, it works really well on the little mobile screen. It’ll be nice to have one that alerts me to incoming tweets, though. ‘Course I could set that up through SMS but this way I don’t have to use up my monthly allotment on them (I cheaped out and went with the 400/month plan instead of the unlimited messaging plan).

Quibbles:

The phone knows my email address; it’s registered to my gmail account; why can’t there be an easy, one button way to insert that address when an online form calls for it? Maybe there is and I haven’t found it (I, of course, have eschewed the manual so far).

It took me a while to find the Nice app for Google Reader. When I accessed it via my iGoogle page, it was all kinds of messed up. When I accessed it via the Google home page, it’s great. Not a big deal, as I can just bookmark it now, but still– why does it vary in the first place?

So, uhm, that’s my short little post on my first thoughts on the G1. Undoubtedly, more will follow.

Ah, those were heady times. The G1 ended up serving me well until I moved on to a Nexus One and I passed it on to a friend who is, no joke, still happily using it.

Whether you had one or not, what are your fond memories of the big-chinned little guy?

Chuck, an at-home dad, spends most of his time hanging out with an amazing little girl and two crazy hounds. He is enthusiastic about pork fat and the Android mobile operating system.

Wow….I held out on mine until an Evo 3D in June. It was barely holding on by a thread at that point. The battery was the main culprit – it would shut off (probably low voltage?) if I tried to do anything intense without being plugged in (like navigation). And it was so hard staying within the tiny amount of on-board storage.

i too wished for the same keyboard on my G2 but i got used to it really quickly. but the G1 and the G2 were pure perfection…..i hope that tradition continues with the inevitable G3……my tablet is even from the G series…..the G slate….perfection in a different form factor.

downvoted for stating the obvious to a retard ? really ? a -3 equals 3 losers with proprietary short dongles and no stamina…..im sure with most women thats a “dealbreaker” too….the headphones were fine, and so was the battery life….calling them dealbreakers is as i said RETARDED !!

I never owned one myself, but a classmate of mine did and I remeber being absolutely floored when he let me borrow it and I was able to easily SSH to my home linux box and quickly check some logs and send a quick basic email through my now defunct (replaced by gmail) email server. That was the day I got hooked on Android.

Personally, I miss the trackball from my old G1… and while the keyboard was nice, I *will not* give up specs just to have a hardware keyboard. As yet, few keyboarded phones have specs as nice as the keyboard-less.

Wow, I too remember getting my G1 a few days early before its street release date. I remember data worked for me, however SMS texting did not. It was funny because when I called T-Mobile about the issue, they no clue what to do. They didn’t yet have a department for Android support. I remember being redirected to T-Mo’s BlackBerry support (because they we’re the “smartphone” department) who obviously had no idea what to do. Eventually texting started working. But even with those issues, I was absolutely in love with the device. It felt so revolutionary and powerful at the time.

I too stuck with the G1 until I got the Nexus One. And man, going from the G1 to the N1 was like night and day. Since then I’ve stayed true to stock Android, moving to a G2, and then a few month later the Nexus S. But I’ll always have a soft spot in my techie heart for the original Google phone that started it all.

Hah, my gf at the time had a G1. I thought it was a major POS =p. I’d use it to look up places on google maps and I’d curse at it when it would take forever to load a web page. I would usually attempt to load up something, get frustrated that it was taking too long, then just pull out my laptop instead, hah. Nowadays I don’t even have to bring a laptop anymore.

I loved my G1. It took a while before I got the guts to hack it, but I eventually put Cyanogenmod Gingerbread 2.2 on it. I sold it about a year ago, with CM, on Ebay for about 130 bucks. I couldn’t believe it was still worth that much. Great memories!

when i got my G1, i was very excited! it was like being a kid in the candy store! it was like no other phone out there, which made it so special! i loved sliding to pull out the keyboard, it made me feel really cool doing it in public :P. i had my G1 for about 6 months, then Rogers (Canada) gave me the Magic (G2) for free and i used that for about a year and a half. i went with Blackberry for about 4 months and it was the worse idea EVER! so now i have the captivate and im waiting to get my hands on the GS (Starting a new trend ;) )

I got this phone a week after it came out…the original “Google Phone”…I remember loading up jesusfreke…then Cyanogenmod…Now I got its brother the G2…but I use the G1 pouch for it… =) …maybe…just maybe G3?…not no LG crap…no disrespect…

I never owned one but I remember when it first came out. It was so exciting to me that there was a competitor to the iPhone that wasn’t exclusive to AT&T. Because of my disability, I knew I couldn’t use the phone at all with the physical keyboard so I had to wait for a full touchscreen. By the time the MyTouch was out, it just wasn’t powerful enough for me. But then the Nexus One was coming out with a 1Ghz chip and I knew I had to have it.

It’s hard to believe that the G1 is only three years old. It almost feels like the the Windows 95 PCs of the Smartphone world.

My friend got one shortly after launch day, and I came home from college one weekend, and he invited me over to check out his awesome new phone. He showed me the G1, and from the second I saw it I wanted it so very badly. He showed me how he could control his radio with his phone, and I was officially in love with the OS. I said goodbye to ever wanting an Apple product the day I went to that friend’s house to see this phone.

Haha I have been missing my old G1′s I got a jailbroken iPhone at the same time as the G1 to try them both out to see which I would like better. And well the iphone ended up just being a ipod touch of sorts and the G1 was my daily driver. Except when a rom was freaking out on me and I would rock the iphone until I could get it fixed after school. Man I am going to have to pick up another G1 at some point if for no other reason then to frame it. Rocking a G2 now and while this is a great phone it just doesn’t quite have the coolness factor that the original had!

Wow this phone gave me all type of surprises from good to bad ones but mostly good ones like the first time I got the 1.5 update and saw a widgit for the first time droped it like a billion times and till this day I can say my G1 still works fine Would of loved to see it get a remake not that the G2 was but it carry the name of an Android ledgen

I bought my G1 when it first came out in Nov, 2008. I rooted the phone, ran many custom ROMS, got a extended battery with a new case. I pushed this phone as far as possible even till android 2.3. until June of this year when tragedy struck and it fell on the ground and the phone antenna stopped working. :( Now i have moved on to the HTC Sensation. We have come a long way old friend. :)

I still use my G1 when leaving home for some kind of outdoor activity. It is now my “SUV” phone while the main one is Samsung Galaxy SII. And everytime I use it I am so happy about the keyboard and specially the rolling ball. Why dont they do it anymore, there is not such accurate cursor placement tool these days.

This was a great post! I get misty-eyed every time I think back to my G1 days. I finally upgraded to the G2x (also on release day), but I still use the pouch. It doesn’t fit perfectly, but the “G1″ tag adds character.

My gf tried to get me to sell it online “while it was still worth something.” I was offended. That phone changed the world… it would always have value. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it so it’s back in the box next to my desk. I take it out when I play around on App Inventor.

I still use my g1 everyday at home controlling my music over wifi. And I take it to any event where I need to hammer out notes quickly. I have the black one but I put the keys from a white one on it because they were glossy. I carry a n1 now but even with swype I can’t type as fast as on my g1. So much love for the old dream machine.

G1 — the grandaddy of Android phones. Man, this brought back so much memories. I can remember reading up about this weird, new OS called Android. Then I heard it was by Google and they were planning on making a phone called G1. It was the “made by Google” part that sold me and I started looking up previews, reading reviews, watching YouTube videos, the more I did, the more I got excited.

When, I eventually got it, I had so much fun with it. Especially one app called gmote. I enjoyed using it to screw with my gf when she was on her laptop. Seizing control of it and clicking on links she didn’t want to click on. She thought she was being hacked and to this day, still thinks she’s being hacked whenever I do it with my G2.

Sadly, some dirty sticky finger stole my G1 on the subway. I wish I still had it. I have the G2 now and I’m hoping T-Mobile comes out with a G3 by the time my contract is expiring.

Awesome phone. I enjoyed it thoroughly & definitely didn’t take it for granted but I went from it to a vibrant ,then put team whiskeys bionix ROM on it, then the immortality overclocked kernel on it. Now I have At&t’s galaxy s 2. Long story short, a long way in a short time. Much respect for Android’s great grandfather:-) If there was a way to pay my respects to an inanimate object I would.

My experience was very similar to the writers. I got lost in the phone for hours after I had it delivered (luckily mine did require a signature so no panicking for me). I too thought it was a mini computer, I still to this day would love another phone with a full qwerty keyboard, I’m hoping we’ll have another soon. I passed mine onto my stepfather after I bought the HTC Desire (being in the UK the Nexus 1 was not available to me at reasonable cost), he is still using it now and very happy with it. I still don’t understand why to this day there is still no option just to paste in your e-mail address in web forms…

My wife and I both bought G1s on launch day. The T-Mobile guy in the store was kind of surprised to see us there. :-) I kept that phone for the full 2 years until the G2 came out and I’m still using the G2 today.

the G2 is an awesome phone !!! id still rank it as one of the top 5 android phones today..mainly for speed, durability, and vanilla-ness of it. Its even better now that its rocking a 32Gig SD card. G2 FTW

I didn’t really want a keyboard, so I passed on the G1 to wait for the Magic after seeing it in 02/09. Little did I know that if I had just waited a small 5 months, I could have gotten a Nexus One. Sigh.

I got mine a month after they came out. I wasn’t due for an upgrade for several more months but I called T-Mo customer service and they bumped me up. Switching that simm from my T-Mobile Wing to the G1 was a special day. It was in use up until a few months ago (I loaded CM6 on it and gave it to my grandson) when I switched the whole family to Sprint.

moving for my G1 to my G2 was a special day for me too…..my G1 sim wouldnt work on my G2 because of the move from 3G to 4G, so they had to copy my sim to the new one with that cool copy device they have. Given the guaranteed tech advancement by next year when my contract is up and hopefully the next G series phone from HTC comes out, ill prob be upgrading my sim again..cant wait .

Got mine for my birthday in March of 09. I used it constantly and was never more nervous than when I rooted it and put jesusfreke on it. The root process took 2 hours of typing code into the terminal. So much fun. My wife thought I was going crazy. Then I bought a mytouch 3g off Craigslist and set my wife up on the G1 (running Cyanogenmod 4). She was hooked. When we moved on to Vibrants we set up her mother with the G1. She used it happily until about a month ago when we all switched to Sprint and everyone went Nexus. Hard to believe all that happened in just the last 2.5 years.

I bought my first g1 on feb 24 2009 on the way to the hospital(my son was being born and me and my wife had to be at the hospital at 4pm) I remember messing with the phone before the doctors came in and very much loving it. I then remember when i got home and starting doing research and learned about rooting the phone. Jesusfreke became a legend to me. then cyanogen took over and the g1 became my favorite phone of all time. I still hav e 2 of them in my house. Saving them just in case i ever go to the andorid bbq i could get cyanogen to sign them. The G1, or as i call it, the little phone that could changed the way i look and purchase phones. Great launch device I still occasionally check the development forum on xda just to see whats going on over there and it seems to still be kicking.

I’m from India and the G1 launched a while later as the HTC Dream …. I remember the First time i saw one , a friend of mine had got it from work.

The day was Dec27 2009, and I was on the hospital bed with a fractured knee and broken collarbone, a slashed chest and missing a huge chunk of flesh from my right biceps, all a result of a dastardly Bike accident the previous day and this guy comes to me and places this phone in front of me. I was smitten. Unable to move my right hand which was bandaged heavily and in a sling hanging by my side I went through the phone using one hand and man, it was beautiful. Gtalk inbuilt, wonderful keyboard, i actually liked the chin. The firs think i did with it was to Login to Gtalk and update my status saying that “Huge accident yesterday, now in hospital, surgery tomorrow and this status has been posted using the Awesome android phone :) from my hospital bed” He had installed some apps on it and had already rooted it.

Two months later when I was able to walk the first thing i did was to go get myself an Android phone, Though I didnt get the G1 i ended up getting the original Samsung Galaxy (i7500) and absolutely looveed it. It had the stock google experience(this was before Samsung introduced the crappy Touchwiz). Installed CM6 on it and was using it until 4 months ago when the battery died. Now I have a Optimus2X (T-mobile G2X) and Absolutely Love it … Gonna install Cm7.1 on it soon .

I definitely thought I had a bit of Google Gold when i first got mine, and i loved it every second i had it. I also upgraded to a Nexus One, and also gave my G1 away to someone who IS STILL USING IT LOL! It was a great intro to awesome mobile after my Blackberry curve that i had for years. The good ol’ days indeed.

Ahh, good times, gooood times :) I can still remember the day my wife and I picked ours up. I had the bronze one and she had black. In fact I can still remember us saying wow the market has over 1,000 apps now. I look back on that and laugh so much. Here is to the one that started it all :3

I rooted and modded every last pinch I could get out of my G1. I finally upgraded in February to a G2.

I find it funny that 2008 should feel like a long time ago. It doesn’t in respect to my work computer, or my desk phone. It does when I think about my kids but they are dynamic and growing, much like the Android environment.

I went and bought that iPhone killer the day it came out, on my lunch break. A few days later I was looking around the internet and heard about this “rooting” thing. It sounded awesome and techy so i was up for the challenge, 30 minutes later i was flipping out cause I thought I had broken it, so i read around and stayed up til 3 am trying to fix and root my G1. Finally I had succeeded and the rest was history. I was a ROM flashing android addict. I moved from my CM powered G1, to a nexus one, to a Droid x, to a fascinate, to a thunderbolt and soon to be Galaxy Nexus. The G1 was the phone that started it all, and for that i thank t-mobile for giving Android a chance here in the states even if there was 465425899432 tip calculator apps in the market at first.

I didn’t get my G1 until a few months after it was released, but that was the first phone I got with my own salary. All the time I spent on the phone… And going through different CM roms… Later I got a G2 and still using it…. Can’t believe it’s three years already.

I still have my G1, delicious coffee brown that it is… I’ve been using the Droid1, which feels a lot like the G1 did, now compared to all the other devices out there. Its always been about the keyboard for me, i’m gonna feel so weird using the nexus prime when i get it.

Before the g1 came out I was rocking the sidekick . I was thinkin about getin the iphone right b4 the g1 came out cuz it was diffrent product then wat was available but I held out ( thank god) . When I first seen the phone I was just puzzled by the look of it ( that weird looking chin) but also interested in it so I started playing around with it at a T-Mobile location …….that experience right there my friends was my love affair that i had with android ( literally I started paying more attention to my phone then my gf lml). I showed off my g1 to every person I knew that had a sidekick and was practically selling the product for Google, I just wasn’t fuckin wit ppl that had an iPhone cuz it was a very good product but still I tried….. and I definitely try even more now cuz hey I hate apple products .I didn’t get rid of my g1 until the nexus s came out (my son has my g1 now it still works proberly) ,I always wanted to get the n1 but just held out cuz I thought the next nexus line would be better and I am not complain cuz I love my NS though my only complaint so far was I couldn’t use the nfc but that’s def about to change big time. I’m ready for the nexus prime ( I like that name better) can’t wait ,thanks Google keep up the great work ur doin wit the android line

I still have my G1. My 2 year contract ended in April and I switched over to Verizon in July so I could get grandfathered in there unlimited plan. Now I’m using a HTC Eris. Another old school phone, but I refused to use my upgrade for the phones that were being released on Verizon at the time. My hopes where on the GS2, looking on this website and phandroid everyday expecting some information regarding the release for big red. My hopes and dreams where shattered when I found out every major carrier would be receiving the GS2 except for Verizon. Soon afterwards I found out the reason for this was a new Samsung phone that Verizon was holding out on. The Galaxy Nexus would soon be in my sights for my next Android phone! I’m glad other carriers are getting the Galaxy Nexus. Releasing it on one carrier would only hurt the Android ecosystem. I love Android!

I also got my g1 in Oct ’08, and I’m still using it—or, as my friends say, “rockin’ it.” Actually, since I don’t do a lot of power photography or desktop publishing with my phone, the g1 is still perfectly adequate for crazy things like calls, email (well..that works most of the time), and sms. I can even do maps if I get really lost and have some spare time. The headset never bugged me because the bluetooth works, and I still dig the keyboard. At some point, I got an extended battery, which makes the phone a bit brick-like. But, you know, the g1 always had Teutonic design sensibilities, and a little more heft isn’t inconsistent with that.

Of course, I window shop T-Mobile now and then. Swype and real-time GPS are appealing. But then all panel phones look and sound like the G1, more or less, and an incremental speed upgrade just isn’t worth the hassle…especially now that the telecom marketeers have figured out how to bedazzle Android.

No other phone will give me the fondest of memories as the ”G1” has given. I became addicted to the Android Where Wall and hungout on the wall 24/7. Damm, I still have love for the great grandfather of any and all Android Phones. ”G1”(not gone.not forgotten). If my G1 could have talked!!!!